Left for Dead?: The Strange Death and Rebirth of the Labour Party. Lewis Goodall
and had little reason to predict it. And with good reason: virtually every poll put Labour and Tories neck and neck. The final polls on the eve of voting day gave Labour a one-point lead. Only one survey, from Survation, reflected the correct result – and it was suppressed by the organisation. On the day before the election, our own Newsnight Index (never repeated), which collated and processed all the polling data to give a daily prediction of seat numbers, forecast a 99 per cent probability of a hung Parliament.
The working assumption was that Labour would probably cobble together a sclerotic minority government propped up by SNP support. Lest I ever think or try and tell myself otherwise, I will always know my own assumptions as to the outcome. I spent election day in Oxford, filming with historians in what would be a two-day shoot. The second day would be spent in Dublin and the flights were all booked. The subject? The 1910 Liberal government, the last left-of-centre government propped up by nationalist support in the House of Commons.¶ Once filming was done, I sat outside the King’s Arms pub on Holywell Street in the early May sunshine, supping a pint or two with my producer (and general TV partner in crime), Zach Brown. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I get insanely excited at the thought of elections. Sadly, I had literally been counting down the years until this one, not least because it was the first I was covering professionally as a journalist. As we chewed the fat as to the sort of political landscape we might be covering when the sun next rose, I joked that, of course, this whole film could be for nothing if the Tories got a majority. We both stared at each other and then literally laughed out loud – ‘No way!’ we guffawed. We went back to our pints. The next day, we cancelled our flights.
The extent of the surprise meant that the 2015 election was like a sudden bereavement for the Labour Party, and the grief that flowed from it was one of the main factors that led to Corbyn’s triumph. As I travelled around different constituency Labour parties across the kingdom I felt I could see the five stages of grief being played out across the faces of the party’s activists.
This was in sharp contrast to the steady-as-she-goes mentality of five years before. The 2010 defeat was a blow but it was expected. It came off the back of the party being in government for a long time, and among some activists there was privately even some sense of relief at the prospect of a spell in opposition. The then Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, had been reported as saying that whoever won the election would have to implement a round of spending cuts so severe that they would be out of office for a generation. Labour had no stomach for that; it was exhausted. In fact, the result was substantially better than many MPs and activists had hoped for. After the worst economic crash in living memory, a 13-year-old government, resignations every other week and a prime minister who made measles look popular, the party was still left with 258 seats. The party’s Scottish heartlands were intact. It had robbed the Conservatives of an overall majority. They would now have to preside over a dire economic inheritance. It would not, it was assumed, be difficult to get back into office next time; perhaps things had worked out for the best.
2015 was of a different order. The surprise of not being back in government had revealed some of the structural weaknesses of the party which had been masked by the unexpectedly decent showing in 2010. The membership began asking some searching questions – it wasn’t clear who could answer them. Because if 2010 had buried New Labour then in 2015 the ‘soft left’ had joined them in the tomb. In two successive general elections, the two main wings of the parliamentary party had been discredited and tarnished with electoral failure. Many began to look elsewhere for answers. As Emily Thornberry was to tell me:
‘What I think happened was that we had been triangulating for a long time and the party membership was prepared to put up with it on the basis we were winning elections. But we weren’t, we had lost two, so maybe it was time to go back and have a think about what we were doing and where we were coming from and have a period of introspection and not be dishonest. I think that there was a rising up of the membership who just said we want someone who sounds like us and thinks like us, we want someone like that leading our party at last.’ In other words, when you’ve not got much to lose, why not have one more roll of the dice? Why not go for something different?
And how different was it anyway? How much of a push? In policy and political terms Miliband had turned the dial to the left. Who was it who proposed the energy price freeze? Who was it first proposed cutting tuition fees? Who was it first divided businesses into ‘predators’ and ‘producers’? It was Miliband; and policy direction was supplemented by cultural moments that altered the impression we had had of how Labour leaders had come to behave, whether it was telling a man in the street that he was ‘bringing back socialism’ or turning up to the Durham Miners’ Gala, the first leader for decades to do so. All of this came together to help create an ideological and cultural space that Corbyn could occupy and could expand.
Within the party at large too, many believe that far-left drifters, hotly observed and weeded out in the New Labour years, were allowed back in under a laxer Miliband. New parliamentary candidates were also of a leftish hue, as Clive Lewis told me:
‘Ed had less command and control on the selection process throughout the country. He worked more closely with the unions … you were getting to see that some people who were in there who’d come through the selection process weren’t from the usual background. So myself, Rebecca Long Bailey,** our politics were a little bit different … now I remember when Lisa Nandy†† got in in 2010 she was kind of singled out as the mad lefty, and she is a good friend of mine, but it just goes to show you how things have changed.’
And maybe the Miliband ideological turn morphing into the Corbyn ideological turn shouldn’t have surprised us. After all, the 2015 leadership contest was the first to be fought in the long shadow of the post-crash era. Technically the 2010 election falls into that category, but given much of the crash and subsequent recession took place in late 2008–9, its profound effects had yet to properly soak our politics. I remember, at the time of the 2010 election, thinking a lot about why it was that, in the immediate wake of a crisis of the system of such magnitude, the result of the following election had been so orthodox: huge recession equals Conservative government, a pretty standard result and normal swing between the two main parties. What I realise now is that that general election and the corresponding Labour leadership election a few months later took place not just in the storm’s wake but, specifically, in its eye. The political class in Westminster and in the country at large hadn’t had time to internalise the profound shock to their long-standing assumptions about the economy, politics, even fundamental philosophies built up since the Thatcher era.
For proof of this you need only look at Labour Party leadership election results. In 2010, David Miliband, the avowed Blairite candidate, came first in every round but the very last and won nearly 50 per cent of the overall vote. Five years later, Liz Kendall, the Blairite candidate, got 2.6 per cent. Was David Miliband a better candidate? Yes. Was he that much better? No. Rather, the crash, as we’ve seen, had destroyed the Blairite analysis, the Blairite agenda, the Blairite prospectus. It had reanimated the left’s.
Just because Blairism was dead did not necessarily mean that the party was automatically the left’s for the taking. But the crash was essential. As John McDonnell later told the New Statesman: ‘The crash was pivotal in shattering confidence for a period in the operation of capitalism and demonstrating the inherent crisis-ridden nature of the system … As people sought an explanation for the crisis, they became open to the traditional ideas of the left, ranging from Marx to [John Maynard] Keynes and [John Kenneth] Galbraith, to the modern analyses of economists like Thomas Piketty.’ And in this we see, once again, the folly of the idea that the left had died. Rather it is always there, waiting for its opportunity. It is no coincidence that the two occasions in modern history when the left has been at its zenith are the early 1980s and the mid-2010s, in both cases at a point when the prevailing political and economic consensus was deemed to have failed.
And, in this, 2015 finds its closest antecedent in 1994. In so many ways the closest parallel to Corbyn is Tony Blair, and that includes the manner of his election. In 1994, just as in 2015, the Labour Party was recovering